Assassination of Orlando Letelier

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On September 21, 1976, Orlando Letelier, a former Chilean diplomat and a leading opponent of dictator Augusto Pinochet, was killed by a remotely detonated car bomb in Washington, D.C. Letelier, who had been living in exile in the United States since 1974, was driving to his office at the Institute for Policy Studies when the bomb exploded beneath his car at Sheridan Circle on Embassy Row. He was killed instantly; his American colleague Ronni Karpen Moffitt, a 25-year-old fundraiser riding in the front passenger seat, died within the hour of injuries from flying shrapnel. Her husband, Michael Moffitt, who was seated in the back, survived with minor wounds.

The assassination of Orlando Letelier was carried out by agents of the DINA, Chile's secret police, in cooperation with anti-Castro Cuban exiles, as part of Operation Condor, a campaign of transnational repression by South American military governments against their political opponents. Declassified U.S. intelligence documents released in 2015 indicate that Pinochet personally ordered the killing in an effort to silence the most effective international voice of the Chilean resistance. The attack, carried out fifteen blocks from the White House, was for decades regarded as the most serious act of state-sponsored terrorism ever committed in Washington, D.C.